AN 82-year-old New Yorker famous for her statement cakes has emerged as the creator of the €100,000 Quinn wedding cake that was exclusively revealed in the Sunday Independent last weekend.

Sylvia Weinstock baked the staggeringly expensive cake in her New York bakery, packed it into 20 boxes and flew it to Ireland for Ciara Quinn's wedding to the solicitor Niall McPartland at a lavish reception for 200 people in Cavan in 2007. Ms Weinstock and her team of assistants reassembled the tiers into a towering six-foot mass of tiered layers surrounded by cascading edible flowers.

The wedding cake -- believed to be the most expensive to ever grace an Irish wedding table -- harked back to the vast wealth of the Quinn family, who now claim they don't have enough money to pay their legal bills.

It appears the family did not always foot their own wedding bills, either. As disclosed in the Sunday Independent last weekend, the cost of the wedding cake was charged to a subsidiary of the Quinn Group, even though her father's business was worth an estimated €4.6bn at the time. Another of Quinn's daughters, Aoife, also had the cost of her wedding billed to the family companies.

It isn't clear if the 400 guests who attended the wedding of Ciara Quinn and Sean McPartland were aware that the wedding cake they munched worked out at a cost of €250 a slice. Ms Weinstock has been creating cakes for more than 30 years, and according to her blog, uses fresh butter, cream, fresh fruit and imported chocolate. Her cakes have been centre pieces at the weddings of the rich and famous.

The many legal proceedings involving the family continued last week when Sean Quinn Jnr's appeal against his imprisonment for contempt of court continued.

The court heard details of contracts providing for termination payoffs of up to €36m for some of the Quinn children. The details were recovered from the hard drive of a computer in Russia.